This just in: Scott McInnis says the "Musings On Water"-gate scandal is a nonissue.

Actually, I'm not sure if he was the source here. Maybe someone else said it and then McInnis repeated it, without attribution. All I know is, I'm waiting for the moment when McInnis tells us that he is not a crook, but, hey, it's still very early in this story.

In any case, McInnis made the "non issue" statement to Adam Schrager of 9News, saying that what interests Coloradans is jobs, which is clearly true. They're interested in their jobs, and we're all interested — I promise — in seeing how you get a McInnis-style job.

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In a McInnis job, you retire from Congress and then sign on for a $300,000 stipend from the Hasan Family Foundation to write a series of articles. Now, here's the good part: In writing "Musings on Water," you either copy someone else's work — making the job much easier — or you outsource the job to someone else, who then copies the work, making your job easier still.

According to McInnis, it was all a researcher's fault, even though McInnis failed to mention any researcher when he turned in the articles. Meanwhile, the researcher, Rolly Fischer, a water expert, told the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, "Scott's responsible for it."

What we know for sure is that McInnis assured the foundation in a memo that the work was "original and not from any other source." Yes, he did.

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And so, it's pretty simple, really. Either McInnis cheated (plagiarizing someone's work) or he lied (getting someone else to do his work) or both, and for a neat $300,000 payoff.

And that, says the man who would be Colorado's governor, is a nonissue, even if, as The Post is reporting today, there seem to be other cases of possible McInnis plagiarism.

Lying seems to be OK to McInnis. Throwing your researcher under the bus — and then backing up over him again, just to be sure — also seems OK. It's also fair, I guess, to take $300,000 and not even check the work that you claim to be yours. McInnis won't say how much he paid the researcher. I'm guessing it was somewhere under $300,000.

And, for the record, not everyone is convinced it's a nonissue. Take the Hasan Family Foundation, which says it might want its money back, like, you know, immediately. It also says it never contracted for a researcher — but only for McInnis' actual work. The honorable thing for McInnis to do would be to return the money. But if he does give the money back, he implicitly admits that, if he were honorable, he never should have taken it in the first place.

There seems to be a slight credibility gap here — and not just for those of us who have had our doubts about McInnis' lose-the-mustache-on-a- Broncos-bet story. There's McInnis' elk-meat-for-the-poor tax story, which began when McInnis had bragged on Caplis and Silverman about how much he gave to charity — when, in fact, he would finally say that his charitable work was limited to donated elk and money given to the Republican National Committee, except, it turned out, that he hadn't given money to the RNC. His PAC had.

Meanwhile, in story after story, McInnis seems unable to remember anything inconvenient, although he did recall, and rather quickly, that someone else must have written the stuff that was stolen, under McInnis' name, from now-Colorado Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs.

McInnis, who chose not to talk to Denver Post reporter Karen Crummy or, for that matter, take questions from your humble columnist, did talk to several people, including 7News' John Ferrugia.

Ferrugia asked McInnis who wrote the articles in question. McInnis said he had "assistance." When Ferrugia asked again if McInnis had written or edited the articles, McInnis dodged and feinted.

When Ferrugia asked a third time, McInnis said, "Hindsight being perfect, I would have. No, I can, I mean, the articles were written with staff assistance. Just like when I do a bill in Congress or when I did the forest plan, I had a lot of staff assistance. I had a lot of economic experts."

I defy anyone to plagiarize — or outline — the preceding paragraph. Of course, no one expects a bill written for Congress to be the work of one person. We expect a bill to be about 2,000 pages long and unreadable.

But writing $300,000 worth of articles is different. It's the $300,000 that made it seem more like a sweetheart deal than a writing assignment.

That's why this is, I'm afraid, a huge nonissue issue. Or maybe you think Ward Churchill ought to get his job back.

It's funny. Republican leaders, who are suddenly so quiet, spent all that effort to force Josh Penry out of the race and clear the way for McInnis. Now the only thing that could possibly save McInnis is the notion that if he were to drop out of the race, Dan "Mileage King" Maes would be, by default, the Republican nominee against John Hickenlooper.

That's what you call an electoral dis aster. Not that you heard it here first.

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